Moving in Reverse (4 page)

“
I’m Liv,” the girl said
as we carried our drinks across the space, weaving around the
people who were walking into the arena. “We’re going to head
backstage in a few minutes, but let me give you one of our CDs,”
she said, picking one up from a stack and handing it to
me.

“
Oh—” I tried to protest,
but she shook her head.

“
Please. If Blake Parker
listens to this once, it’s worth the fifty cents it costs to make
them,” she grinned.

I slipped the case into my bag and
thanked her. “What kind of music is it?” I asked.

“
Girly alternative,” Liv
responded as if she were giving an interview. “Tori Amos meets Katy
Perry — Lilly plays piano,” she gestured to the girl already seated
in the booth. “So it’s this kind of edgy sound, but pretty. You’ll
like it,” she assured me.

I probably would. I’d seen some pretty
wretched opening acts on the Moving Neutral tour — one of their
opening bands had created his own instrument that was half electric
guitar and half harp, and then set it on two mannequin legs to play
it. But Liv seemed pretty normal.

“
What do you
play?”

“
Bass,” she giggled. “I
mean, I can play regular guitar too, and drum a little, but for
now, it’s bass.”

I liked bass players. They were
usually the most low-key, even for professional rock
stars.

“
Are you guys from New
York?”

“
Brooklyn,” she said. “For
the last five years, at least. But I grew up in North
Carolina.”

I felt my eyes widen in surprise. “My
roommate is from North Carolina,” I said, my fingers lingering on a
stack of tee-shirts. “From Raleigh.” Funny how the same place could
produce Darby and this girl.

Liv nodded at me, as if she understood
what I wasn’t saying. “I grew up on a farm in Asheville,” she said.
“It’s this little hippie town with great music and food,” she
paused. “No debutantes.”

I laughed out loud, and after a day
that seemed to get more awkward every minute, it was a welcome
relief.

“
You want to head
backstage?” she asked me, gesturing to the side door I’d come out
of. I nodded, not particularly excited to face Nate
again.

As I watched Liv punch in the same key
code and open the door, I lingered for a moment, ostensibly
finishing the drink before walking inside.

“
Coming?” she asked, her
voice wavering with excitement. I remembered when going backstage
was something rare and thrilling for me too. It was hard to hold
onto that feeling, after you’d single-handedly broken up the one
band you’d sneak backstage for.

“
Right behind you,” I
sighed, ducking through the door.

It was after midnight by the time
Blake and I got into a cab to head back to campus, and my first
class was just over nine hours away. I snuggled closer into Blake’s
leather jacket, which he’d put over my shoulders as soon as we’d
walked outside.

“
Did you have fun?” he
asked, his voice sounding tentatively hopeful.

“
Sure,” I tried to smile,
but I could tell it came out half-hearted. I was already coming
back to earth, thinking about the reading I hadn’t started for
tomorrow morning, the sleep I could already feel myself missing out
on.

And tomorrow was only Tuesday. I still
had a whole week of Rush with Darby to look forward to.

“
Thanks for coming,” Blake
said, brushing his lips against my hair. “I feel like those guys
think I’ve lost my mind.” His voice was sarcastic, but I could hear
a hint of sadness in it.

I’d been so busy thinking about what
Nate and the others thought of me, I hadn’t focused at all on how
Blake must be feeling. Watching his friends go onstage, knowing
that he’d given it all up. I didn’t say anything for a moment,
trying to figure out how to lighten the mood.

“
I liked that girl Liv,” I
said finally. “She gave me one of their CDs, but I think she really
wanted you to have it.” I took the disc out of my bag and held it
out to Blake, like it would help, somehow.

“
You listen first,” he
grinned at me. “Tell me if it’s any good.”

I rolled my eyes exaggeratedly, and
put the CD back into my pocket, snuggling closer to Blake in the
back of the cab and watching the lights go by outside. It was
almost one a.m. on a Monday, and still there were people on every
street corner, late-night restaurants and bars just starting to
empty out. As we stopped at a traffic light, a couple with a
bulldog on a leash crossed the street.

Blake ran a finger through one of my
still-lingering curls, wrapping one arm around me and pulling me
close. I rested my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes, happy
for the moment that he was really there. Sometimes I still couldn’t
believe it.

Chapter Five

My alarm rang at seven a.m. My first
class was at ten, and I had about a hundred pages of Thomas Pynchon
to finish before then. I figured I’d head to the dining hall for
some terrible coffee and equally bad scrambled eggs and be in the
library by eight at the latest.

The alarm rang again an hour
later.

The next time it rang, Darby threw her
pillow at me.

“
If you don’t shut that
damn thing off,” she said, which whipped my eyes open because Darby
was a Young Lady Who Did Not Swear, “I’m going to throw it out the
window.”

I glanced at the clock, feeling a pit
in my stomach. Three black digits stared back at me, easily visible
with the sunlight streaming into the room. It was nine-fifteen, and
I had class in forty-five minutes.

I jolted upright, feeling panic rise
in my throat. Looking at my nightstand, I saw the book, the corner
of a page turned down within the first chapter. I hadn’t even made
it to chapter two.

The book itself was two or three
hundred pages of meaningless words strung together — I’d struggled
through a chapter before going to sleep, my head fuzzy and
exhausted. The first ten pages were just a long, wordy stream of
consciousness — esoteric, confusing, slapped together like someone
throwing tennis balls at a Velcro wall, hoping one would stick. I
read each page three times before giving up and falling asleep.
What kind of a name was Oedipa?

The last book we’d read at Prospect
was The Great Gatsby — which was much more my
wavelength.

I sat up in bed, feeling like my head
was too heavy to lift.

“
Remember, we have Rush at
four,” Darby said, her voice muffled through her pillow. “So you
should be back here by two for me to do your hair.”

My hand involuntarily went to the
smushed ringlets I’d slept on all night, which I could feel were
sticking out from my head at odd angles.

I could either take a shower or get
breakfast. Reading before class wasn’t really even an option. I
figured maybe I’d have a better sense of how to approach the book
after the professor’s lecture.

Picking up my shower caddy and a
towel, I shrugged my feet into flip-flops and walked down the
hallway, sighing inwardly as the engineer across the hall emerged
from her room, carrying a stack of complicated-looking calculus
books that I was sure she’d already read and memorized.

When I got to the girls’ bathroom,
there were already two people in line ahead of me for the shower.
Today just wasn’t my day.

In fact, it hadn’t really been my day
for about two months. I looked down at my purple flip flops and
frowned — hitting our bathroom with half an hour before class was a
terrible idea. And I hadn’t even brought the book with
me.

I tried to remember the last sentence
I’d read the night before, just as I was starting to drift off to
sleep.

I was barely in time for class,
slipping into the seat Blake had saved for me with his jacket just
as the professor approached the podium to begin. I gave Blake a
sheepish look as I opened my laptop and typed the date into the top
of a Word document.

“
Morning,” he mouthed,
picking up a cup of coffee from the floor and setting it next to my
laptop. “Sorry for keeping you out so late,” he smiled, not looking
sorry at all.

The professor cleared his throat,
waiting for the last whispers of conversation to die down. Thanks
to Blake, I was sitting in the third row, and the professor looked
directly at me as he began the lecture.

“
Chaos,” he said, still
looking at me, and then shifted in place, looking down at his
notes. “Literary chaos. Paranoia. Alienation. Conspiracies.
Hallucinations.”

Blake stole a glance at me, his mouth
set into a thin line to conceal a smile. I looked down at my
laptop, and typed the words into my document to stop myself from
laughing.

“
In reading Thomas
Pynchon, it’s easy to get lost — like the characters, searching for
an answer, we instinctively reach for some explanation that may or
may not even exist. But the chaos is what matters here, and the
trick isn’t to find that solution, it’s to understand
why
we’re searching for
it. This need to
understand
, to put order to madness,
is exactly the joke here — and it’s on all of us.”

Blake looked rapt, staring at the
professor without bothering to write down a word. I stared at the
screen of my laptop, trying to transcribe the important points (as
if I could pick out the important points without actually having
read the book). I took a sip of the coffee Blake had brought me,
and looked at his copy of the book, the spine creased from opening
it over and over.

Something buzzed in my purse, and I
pulled out my cell phone, thankful that it was silenced. At least I
wasn’t that girl with the ringing phone in the middle of class.
Opening it up, I read a text message from a number I didn’t
recognize.

How’s class? U coming
again 2nite? xx liv

I smiled. By the end of the night,
after another two rum and cokes that the bartender had snuck
backstage, I had started complaining to Liv about the book I was
supposed to be reading for the next morning. Blushing, I remembered
taking it out and pointing to a random page, giggling at the fact
that it made no sense.

“
College is overrated,”
she’d said with a totally straight face, and I blushed, wondering
if she was right. What, exactly, was I learning here?

I shut the phone without texting
back.

“
This novel demands your
analysis, begs you to work your way through its twists and turns,
all the while knowing that your effort, like Oedipa’s, will amount
to nothing. It avoids explanation in favor of experience, and
descending into the conspiracy is the only way through — and then,
at the very end, the reader is left hanging. What in a lesser book
would be the climax is here simply the end of the story — as if
Pynchon reminds us, yet again, that the outcome matters less than
the journey, that the answer is beside the point.”

I leaned back over my computer,
faithfully typing the professor’s words, line after
line.

At least now I knew how it
ended.

It was almost lunchtime when Blake and
I filed out of the classroom, and I was even more lost than I’d
been before the lecture started. We had six more books to get
through this semester, and then exams. The October morning was
crisp and chilly, and I wrapped my sweater around my body, feeling
the first crunch of dry, fallen leaves on the path as we walked
through campus.

“
So Fall Guy is playing
again tonight?” I broke the silence, wanting to talk about anything
other than Thomas Pynchon.

Blake smiled at me, looking curious.
“Did they get you on their email list?”

“
That girl Liv — she
texted me this morning,” I explained. “I probably shouldn’t go —
thanks to Darby, I have Rush all afternoon, and I’m so behind in
multivariable calculus that I might not catch up by senior year,” I
sighed.

Blake looked down at me, his eyes
bright and happy. “I can’t believe I have a girlfriend who takes
multivariable calculus.”

“
You might have a
girlfriend who fails multivariable calculus if I don’t get to the
library,” I giggled, still a little giddy every time Blake called
me his girlfriend. It brought me back to the first time, the summer
before, when he let it slip as he tried to calm me down after our
first fight. It had slipped out in a way that made me realize he’d
been thinking about it for a while.

“
Case,” Blake looked at
me, his face serious again. “What’s the point of this Rush
thing?”

I thought about Darby’s
ringlet curls, the totally weather- and location-inappropriate
dress she’d picked out for me. The girls who were either fake or
starstruck — and it wasn’t as if I was really even a star. I
hadn’t
done
anything myself — I was quasi-famous for dating Blake, and
nothing else.

“
Darby would have a fit if
I dropped out,” I said lightly, trying to change the subject. Blake
was probably right — I didn’t really want to be in a sorority. But
I also wanted my roommate to like me, and if that meant playing
dress-up and eating pink cupcakes, I could handle a week of
it.